John T. Reed’s news blog

I am reading an article on army ranger school today. They get 2,500 calories a day. We got one C-ration a day. Each ration were 1,200 calories. You can look it up. And they say the rangers today are hungry all the time. Wimps. . https://www.outsideonline.com/2411895/army-ranger-school?utm_source=pocket-newtab . The reporter says, “Why do they voluntarily subject themselves to this?” . Voluntarily my ass. For my West Point class (’68), if you chose a combat arm as your branch, you had to go to the damned ranger school. I wrote here recently about a recently deceased classmate of mine who deliberately flunked...

On TV and in one-on-one conversations, I keep hearing stuff along the lines of this is a “great country” so nothing really bad is about to happen. . The covid 19 shutdown closed more of the economy than the Great Depression did at its peak. . Fact. . This “great country” stuff, in contrast, is Easter Bunnyish. . The federal government took the pop of a stock market bubble in 1929 and turned it into a decade-long Great Depression through overly tight money and all sorts of nutty government experiments on business and programs like the CCC. Absent government getting...

Here is a haunting passage from general practitioner lawyer Benjamin Roth’s Depression Diary. He wrote it on February 7, 1933..“In numerous talks with businessmen I find a higher valuation than ever placed on ‘financial security’ and ‘freedom from want.’ During the boom of 1928 businessmen scorned to leave their money in safe investments yielding only 4% or 5%.”.Four years later he wrote,.“A major risk should not be taken for a minor profit.”.The two great financial investment risks are inflation and deflation. Tremendous financial catastrophes occurred in the Great Depression (deflation) from 1929 until WW II and in the hyperinflation in...

I completed my redemption of all our EE savings bonds. I also rescued $1,000 in cash that my wife had in our safe deposit box. . Again, if we tip over into hyperinflation, dollar-denominated assets like cash become worthless quickly. Savings bonds, which took a week of my time to redeem, would have been worth a little the first day, but nothing after a week. But we did not tip over into hyperinflation while I was doing it. . I put the money into a Schwab 1000 index fund and TC REX, which is a TIAA CREF REIT index fund...

We do not have capital controls. They are banana republic, dictator laws, but we will get them shortly after we get hyperinflation, if we get it..But we do have some laws designed to harass those of us who do what capital controls would ban: hold foreign accounts. We are required to submit IRS Form 8938 (https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-prior/i8938--2019.pdf) and Fin Cen Form 114 (https://bsaefiling.fincen.treas.gov/NoRegFBARFiler.html) annually as punishment for having foreign accounts. Having such accounts is legal, but the would-be, banana-republic dictators in the Deep State wish they were illegal. No tax is due except on interest you earn on foreign accounts..Form 8938...